The Beginnings

The Beginnings

So the first question is always why? (Well other than which game) Why would you take so much time playing one game just to see how fast you can beat it? I’ll answer your question with another question (and I think you know where I’m going with this) which is “Why not?”

For those of you who have seen any of the Games Done Quick or TAS (Tool Assisted Speedruns) videos, you can see some crazy shit. I’m not kidding. Some of the stuff that these runners pull off isn’t just out of this world, it’ll melt your childhood. It’s amazing what you can do within the confines of a videogame that the developers would have never intended. Luckily with the absence of the internet during the 80s and 90s (years where the majority of the games played were created), these exploits can’t be patched out like new games can today. This has bred a community that finds these tiny holes in a game’s code and blow them wide open.

More specifically for me, it’s the idea of completely understanding something through and through. Since the game itself is finite (for the most part at least, you can still find new things in really old video games) meaning that there is an end to what can be learned. I like that feeling. Knowing how everything moves, how everything ticks, when to jump, when not to jump. That makes me feel… warm inside. It’s a strange feeling, but it’s kind of like knowing every single line to your favorite movie. You are still going to watch the moving again and again, but you have that feeling of standing next to your best friend. It’s a good feeling.

Now onto my game. I picked the Nintendo Entertainment System’s Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers. It wasn’t a random choice mind you. It started from a conversation that Eric Bailey and I were having over Twitter during one of the AGDQ events (Awesome Games Done Quick). He had heard about a challenge of playing a single player game in 2 player mode. Meaning that you’ll have to carry the second character around the entire game without killing him or dying in the process.

Upon further research, it appears that the challenge was initially created by a gamer known as BenevolentDickNES to another YouTuber known as Lumpz the Clown. For the video in question you can find that here.

Chip and Dale was a game that I’ve played through the majority of my childhood and was very fond of both it and the cartoon. It seemed like a good a choice as any when deciding to start speedrunning. So that’s pretty much it.

On top of that it’s a fairly short game. Quick paced, fun platformer, and just a great game in general. There’s very little RNG (random number generator. See you are learning all types of new things today. Good on you.), very predictable for learning patterns and the like. Plus I actually own a copy of the game which is a huge win (more on that later).
I’m hoping to document this as much as possible with no official end date in sight. I’m planning on writing down as many of my raw thoughts as possible along with any and all resources I plan on using or discovering. So welcome to my journey, I look forward to seeing how far I get. Maybe even to AGDQ? Maybe not. We’ll see. Whoooo!